Tag Archives: Transhumanism

Transgenderism and Transhumanism

Defending the Faith, Evolution, Magisterium, ,

There is a sense that the cultural tide is shifting away from widescale acceptance of transgenderism.  One gets the feeling that yesterday’s advocates are turning into today’s skeptics.  That the ideologues were willing to sacrifice children on the altar of “gender affirmation” certainly sped up the process, but there is another reason why ideological support is waning.  For the intellectual elite and their ilk transgenderism was always meant to be a port of entry into a Brave New World and nothing more; an on-ramp to the Transhumanist superhighway.  Once the court of public opinion begins voting to convict, the “Transgender Moment” will have outlived its usefulness and they will begin to sever their ties to it, leaving thousands of victims in their wake.

Linking them Up

Transgenderism and transhumanism may only seem to be tangentially linked, but a closer examination shows the transgenderism to be fruit from the transhumanist tree.  At the heart of the transgender ideology is a shift in identity.  We are not body and soul composites, but minds operating in bodies. The body is viewed as no more than gendered machines that can be modified to suit the sexual intuition of the individual.  What it found out rather quickly is that no amount of technological tinkering can alter the machine so that a man might really become a fully-functioning woman and vice versa.  “Gender affirming care” became quite the opposite and left its victims in sexual limbo by becoming permanently disfigured, resembling neither sex.

From this perspective it appears to have been a failure.  But that was never really the point.  The point was to sell an intellectual bill of goods and the culture was found willing to pay the dues.  Not only does it show that most people view themselves as ghosts in a machine, but that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature. 

This is not mere speculation, but the plan of one of the planners himself.  Martine Rothblatt is one of Forbes’ Top 50 richest self-made women .  He is so successful that not being a woman isn’t an obstacle to appearing on a list of the most successful women.  Rothblatt shows his hand when, in his 2011 book Transgender to Transhumanism, he says:

“I came to realize that choosing one’s gender is merely an important subset of choosing one’s form. By form, I mean that which encloses our beingness … I came to this realization by understanding that 21st century software made it technologically possible to separate our minds from our bodies. This can be accomplished by downloading enough of our neural connection contents and patterns into a sufficiently advanced computer and merging the resultant mindfile with sufficiently advanced software—call it ‘mindware.’…”

If you can choose a body to house your gendered mind, then why must we ultimately choose a body at all?  Why couldn’t we choose an avatar that avoids all the messiness of the body like pain, sickness and ultimately death?  What if we just linked our minds with some computer or some other hive mind? 

Building on this point, Rothblatt connects the dots further by saying:  

“In a similar fashion I now see that it is also too constraining for there to be but two legal forms, human and non-human. There can be limitless variation of forms from full fleshed to purely software with bodies and mind being made up of all degrees of electronic circuitry between. To be transhuman one has to be willing to accept that they have a unique personal identity beyond flesh or software and that this unique personal identity cannot be happily expressed as either human or not.  It requires a unique transhuman expression.”

If gender is not binary, then, Rothblatt contends, any aspect of personality is also on a spectrum.  This leads him to conclude that we should view humanity itself as a spectrum.  This is at the heart of the Transhumanist project, expanding the spectrum towards some post-human ideal. 

The Connection to Evolution

It also shows a willingness to abandon biology in favor of evolution.  What I mean by this is that biology really doesn’t matter when you can grab the evolutionary reins for yourself.  This is, according to the popular author Yuval Noah Harrari account in Homo Deus, the great project of the 21st Century:

“In the twenty-first century, the third big project of humankind will be to acquire for us divine powers of creation and destruction, and upgrade Homo sapiens into Homo deus. This third project obviously subsumes the first two projects, and is fueled by them. We want the ability to re-engineer our bodies and minds in order, above all, to escape old age, death and misery, but once we have it, who knows what else we might do with such ability? So we may well think of the new human agenda as consisting really of only one project (with many branches): attaining divinity…Now humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design, and to extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic.”

Herein ultimately lies the reason that the Church was caught flat-footed during the transgender moment and will remain so as the Transhumanist train leaves the station: an unwillingness to address the false evolutionary paradigm that animates the posthuman agenda.  Because God is Logos, there can be no disconnect between the physical laws and the moral law.  The physical laws can even be instructive of the moral law.  For human beings to cooperate with the physical laws constitutes a morally good act.  Now, if (macro)evolution is true, then it would not be wrong to cooperate with it or even to aid in the process.  More specifically, if evolution is true, then there really is nothing wrong with men trying to enhance humanity so as to bring about the next evolutionary step. 

In order to combat it then, we must go to the source of the error—evolution.  The Church, still gun shy from the Galileo affair 500 years ago, is scared to confront the theological, metaphysical and moral errors of evolution.  Instead, her members try to remain neutral and some even go so far as to reinterpret Scripture to make it fit.  This simply cannot go on any further and it is time to reach back into Tradition and refute this error head on.

Evolution and the COVID-19 Vaccine

Abortion, Anthropology, Bioethics, Evolution, , , , , , ,

It has been noted on a number of occasions on this site, the bait and switch that those wedded to scientific materialism use to sell their evolutionary worldview.  They use the term Evolution in such an elastic manner that it is refute.  Only the most narrow-minded Fundamentalist would fail to see evolution in action in even the tiniest bacteria that grows resistant to antibiotics.  Darwin himself used the example of finches on the Galapagos islands with their varying adaptive beak lengths.  In short, the fact that there is abundant evidence of limited variation within species does not allow us to conclude that finches turned into something else.  This grand claim does not follow from the smaller claim.  In fact, the smaller claim fits perfectly well with the Biblical notion that God created various kinds of creatures.  But this foundation of limited variation (or what we might call microevolution) is not strong enough to carry the weight of Macroevolution.  In fact, intellectually honest scientists all admit that limited variation is little more than a prop for Evolution because there is no currently accepted mechanism among scientists by which, even given long time periods, one kind becomes another.  The insistence that the evolutionary claim is true, despite no solid evidence, is really meant to be a smokescreen that scientists are actually not as sure as they present themselves to be.  This smokescreen is necessary because it is really because Evolution is a philosophy and not about science at all.

Humanism and the Evolutionary Smokescreen

For evidence of this we need look no further than the ongoing Covid crisis.  Under the microevolutionary model, we should expect that as time goes on, different variants of Covid-19 would tend to be more contagious and less deadly.  Why is that?  Because of survival of the fittest.  Those variants which are able to spread easier while not killing their host, would naturally be selected.  Viruses that are deadly, even if they are highly contagious, simply don’t last because they kill their host.  Assuming that the numbers are accurate, this is precisely why we are currently seeing an uptick in “cases” while the attributed deaths are in decline.  This is exactly what should be expected according to the microevolutionary model.

Why then, if we are following the “science” should we have terror in our hearts for the new variants?  Because science, even when it fits the evolutionary narrative, always takes a backseat to philosophy.  The philosophy that is propped up by scientific evolution is humanism and when science is not useful then it must be discarded or ignored. 

Humanism represents a catch-all philosophical school in which man is the measure of all things.  All forms of it end up in the deification of man and the de-deification of God.  It is at the heart of the not-so-modern attempt to fulfill the promise that “you will be like God”.  Buttressed by the view that man has evolved from bacteria rather than as a Special Creation from the hand of God, it professes that man is at the pinnacle of reality.  Every problem, every limitation, natural or not, can be overcome by human reason aided by technology.

Humanism and the Vaccine

It is this viewpoint that causes the oligarchs to set aside actual science in pursuit of their humanistic ambitions.  If the evolutionary truth that the virus is losing some of its power gets out, then people will not get the “vaccine” which is, in a very real way, the next step in humanism’s evolution of man. 

I put vaccine in scare quotes because what is currently being pedaled as a vaccine isn’t a vaccine, at least in the traditional sense of the term. Vaccines are artificial attempts to trigger the body to act in a natural way, enabling it to defend itself when it encounters the wild-type virus.  There are various schools of thought as to whether this triggering of the immune response works, but its goal is to keep you from getting sick using the natural processes of the body.

The new mRNA vaccines, at least according to the manufacturers, are altogether different.  Rather than acting as vaccines, they are akin to gene therapies.  They do not keep the person from getting the virus but instead attempt to stimulate them to create it.  More specifically, it injects a strand of artificial mRNA into the person that causes them to create the S1 spike protein.  In short, it has your body create the very toxin that normally makes it sick.  The hope is that your body will become “familiarized” with the protein and not have as strong of an immune response when it encounters it in the wild.

The details matter not just from a health standpoint but also from a moral and anthropological standpoint.  The ongoing debate in the Church about the moral obligation to receive these vaccines and their complicity in abortion is mostly a red herring.  And not just because these are not vaccines in the traditional sense, but they also represent an attempt at transhumanism.  Coaxing the body to produce something that is not natural is simply an attempt to modify human nature.  It is not in accord with the nature of man to make spike proteins.  This power of making spike proteins, in other words, goes beyond (trans) human nature.  And the Church has always taught that such attempts to alter human nature, either temporarily or permanently, is a grave evil.   

Summarizing then we can say that these “vaccines” even if they didn’t rely on aborted fetal cells would still be wrong.  Catholics should recognize that they are thinly veiled attempts at transhumanism and the Church should condemn them for what they are.  Unfortunately, the pandemic of humanism has even infected many in the Church as well.

It is an evolutionary mindset that is behind this attempt.  If random selection is true, then tinkering with human nature itself is not only licit, but laudatory.  It is simply speeding up man’s ultimate deification through evolution. As Harvard University Paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson once said, “The fact that man knows he evolves entails the possibility that he can do something to influence his own biological destiny. The fact that uncontrolled evolution often leads to denegeneration and usually to extinction makes it highly advisable that man take a hand in determining his own future.”

This understanding of reality, in which man is “nothing but” a collection of cells arranged by natural selection, means that it is possible to manipulate man’s production of certain cells, without upsetting the rest of the body.  This paradigm ultimately does great harm to the whole person because the body is not just a conglomeration of parts, but an integrated whole designed by God. If the vaccine ultimately doesn’t work then it really doesn’t matter because the more fit will survive either way.  There is no way to lose because it has moved evolution chain ever upward to man’s deification.